Digital Millenials When Push Comes to Shove
Ants let loose
To crawl from paper
To screens.
Digital millennials
Thought
Words
Became manifest.
A love fest
An Arab Springs revival
Not massacre at Tiananmen square.
Not killing fields of Cambodia.
Now we are doing Palestine
On
Instant coffee, addictive,
And insubstantial.
Israel is also real.
See?
Both sides of the
Wailing wall.
I Dread
I dread
The quiet knock at the door.
Political canvassers fishing for votes.
I dread,
Questions about my creed, my beliefs.
That will not accommodate hybrids.
I dread conversation’s opening gambits,
That attempt to map the grid
Of my faith, ethnicity,
My integral need, to be true
To myself first. Society be curst.
I dread,
Saying I’m a Hindu, happy to be,
Bringing up my children,
In Christianity.
All ways are viable to me.
Your surprise and shock
Is a mystery.
I dread a horrid wake up call,
In anarchic future ruled by ghouls
Who’d like to take apart my rainbow sutures.
Tear apart my children’s futures.
Bright threads that accommodate
Asking me to preach their hate.
Silence.
I remember Hippolyta being torn to delicate shreds.
The Parabolini in every faith
I Dread.
I belong to her world.
Where standards are applied.
I am allowed to ponder, I decide.
My freedom to straddle both sides
Of this wild ride.
Inclusivity is not sympathy for
One side.
Parabolini dismembered her wisdom.
Like a mangled marionette, barbaric fate
Meted out to the erudite.
I dread
Conversations, mouthing conventions,
Pre-determination posing as discussion.
Identity thieves preaching conversion,
Supremacists selling salvation.
Playing into gloved hands
Slaying souls with love
Decisions of Convenience
Made beforehand.
I want to be myself
More than ever before.
When I see how uniformity is
Being sold. Perhaps we don’t know,
Or choose to forget, Paths
Are not oaths. We never swore
To keep it narrow and straight.
They evolve, revolve, returning you at
The gate, here you stand,
Where you started.
On open grounds of neutrality,
Questions and answers shake hands, uncertain.
Again and again. Common ground is our
Invaluable gain.
And there may be more than one option.
Multiple choices, myriad voices
Music in noises.
Please don’t deny my children.
Don’t muzzle
Their choices.
Dumpster Fire Press 